Identity of Soviet spy who triggered Cold War revealed

London, June 11 (ANI): The identity of the spy, who passed on Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and triggered the Cold War, has been revealed with the opening of the KGB and MI5 files 70 years later.

For ten years a Soviet spy codenamed “Eric” gave Britain’s nuclear secrets to Moscow. While the KGB treasured him as its “main source” of atomic intelligence and the MI5 suspected him, he was never caught.

Eric can finally be identified as Engelbert (Bertie) Broda, a brilliant Austrian scientist who evaded Britain’s spy-catchers for a decade, The Times reported.

The amazing story of Bertie Broda is a tale of espionage and counter-espionage, elaborate spycraft, love and deception. But, above all, it is the story of a double-life, filling in one of the last pieces in the complex jigsaw of Cold War espionage.

The most remarkable thing about the scientist-spy was his ability to evade detection: he died in 1983, a celebrated professor of science at the University of Vienna.

The KGB archives are now sealed, but for a brief window in the mid-1990s, a KGB officer named Alexander Vassiliev gained access to the files and began transcribing their contents. Vassiliev’s notebooks form the basis of a new book, published in the US this month, revealing Broda’s pivotal role in Soviet atomic espionage, the report said.

MI5 has also recently declassified its files on Broda, allowing the story of the spy who got away to be told for the first time. Engelbert (also known as Berti, or Bertie) was 28 when he arrived in Britain in 1938, the paper reports.

Broda died in 1983, at the age of 73. He is buried in a Vienna cemetery in a “grave of honour”, a tribute to one of Austria’s most distinguished scientists. (ANI)